Developer Productivity Improvements in Corticon 5.6

The latest release of Corticon packs major improvements in the way you test rules, examine ruleflows, customize reports and more. See what’s new in Corticon.

In October, Progress released Corticon 5.6, the latest version of our leading Business Rules Engine. This feature packed release provides enhancements in many areas. One focus in the release was rule developer productivity. Following are highlights of some of the developer productivity enhancements in 5.6. More details can be found here.

New Vocabulary Search

If you’ve worked on any big rule projects, this will be your favorite feature in Corticon 5.6. You can now search for all references to an entity, attribute, or association in a project. From the vocabulary editor select any item, right click, and select “Find References.” This search will run in the background and populate the “Search” view. You can double click on any match to open the corresponding asset.

Rule Test Enhancements

Corticon has long supported the best practice of creating tests for rule projects; this has been improved further in Corticon 5.6. The tester was improved to provide navigation controls for next/previous difference and to show the number of differences. In addition, you can now mark “key attributes” in a test to aid in comparisons. In some projects tests could fail arbitrarily due to changes in hash order of entities. By marking “key attributes” you are instructing Corticon to use that attribute as a key when matching output and expected results.

New Ruleflow Dependency Graphs

You can now generate dependency graphs for ruleflows. The “Logical Dependency Graph” shows a useful graph depicting the dependencies between nodes in a ruleflow. The “Attribute Dependency Graph” shows the dependencies on one or more selected attributes in a ruleflow. This allows you to perform impact analysis by seeing where attributes are used.

Customizable Reports

The asset reports in Corticon Studio have been improved and are now easily customized. When you select to display a report you will be presented with a dialog where you can pick the type of report and style. The options presented correspond to XSLT and CSS files in the <corticon_work>/Reports folder. You can add new XSLT or CSS files here and they will be available in the report dialog.

New Extension Mechanism

The Service Callout and Extended Operator mechanism have been improved to make it easier to use extensions in a project. Extensions are now packaged in their own jar files. To use a set of extensions in Corticon you add the jar file containing them to a project. When a project is packaged into an EDS file, the extension jar files are bundled into the EDS file. This encapsulation makes it easy to deploy a decision service that uses extensions.

New Validation Behavior

Corticon Studio was improved to perform asset validation on a background thread. This “continuous” validation ensures that your project state is kept up-to-date with any changes you make.

Try Corticon for Yourself

Want to try Corticon for yourself? Corticon 5.6 is available to all current active Corticon users and is available for new users to evaluate for free.

And as always, you can post questions to the Corticon community, or feel free to leave a comment below.

Jim Arsenault is an accomplished software architect and engineering manager with a record of leading high performance teams that deliver great products on time. Jim has been a software architect, programmer, tester, writer, trainer, strategist and manager and his experience creates global, agile teams.

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